I’m off work at the moment with the first really heavy cold I’ve had since I started doing triathlon (so there you go, kids: serious physical training doesn’t necessarily weaken the immune system). I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, as I find the quality depressing, but when I’m ill I will read with the same voracity I did before I became such an intolerant critic.

My first day of lying in bed feeling sorry for myself I read two books with superficially similar themes: Bareback by Kim Whitfield, called Benighted in the States (presumably for some colloquial connotation lost on we Brits); and Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. These are both debut novels.

Bitten follows the trials and tribulations of Elena, the only female werewolf in a population of about 35 living in a human world, and her battle to find happiness by coming to terms with her true nature rather than making herself unhappy by striving for “normal”. It’s the typical tale of the girl ignoring passion in favour of decency, only to discover that she herself is passionate and passion is the way to go. It just happens to be dressed up in fur and fangs. It’s a romance novel given a violent edge by the twist of lycanthropy.

It read to me very much as a wish-fulfillment book — and I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, in and of itself. I have no issue with people writing their own fantasies. Unfortunately it’s written in first person, and Armstrong does somewhat belabour a number of the issues past boredom to the point where I wanted to take the author (not the heroine — the author) by the throat, shake her roughly and say “Get on with it woman! Stop throwing in new cul-de-sacs in the plot: we all know where you’re going with this and have done since roughly Chapter Three!”

I found the prose sometimes clumsy and there was a strong overtone of action-adventure novel that I found distracting from the overall theme. It reminded me of Romancing The Stone, which is not a good thing.

By contrast, Bareback was a rare treat: an original treatment of a popular genre. In Whitfield’s story we are dumped unceremoniously in a world where lycanthropy is the norm and always has been. The poor unfortunate “cripples” who don’t change at the full moon are forcibly taken at birth into the arms of the Department Of Regulation of Lycanthropic Activities (DORLA), which is part-police, part-Inquisition. Reworked history is woven quite skilfully into the tale, so as the work progresses the reader comes to understand how this world is similar to our own in so many ways; and yet so utterly, utterly different. The story tackles a subject that is politically relevant to where we find ourselves now, here: the issue of those people who are vital to society functioning smoothly and yet who are treated as less than second-class citizens by those who consider themselves to be society; as well as the shocking, although inevitable, consequences of that subset of the population declining in number. The ultimate punt in Whitfield’s book makes pharmaceutical companies witholding new medicines for financial gain look almost acceptable, and turns the notion of embryonic genetic selection for desirable attributes on its head (almost literally).

Whitfield also manages to address the issue of being true to one’s own nature as opposed to “fitting in”, and yet manages to do so while leaving the reader with uncertainty as to whether her protagonist made the right choice: which is as it should be. How many of us are ever sure we’ve absolutely made the right choice? Also, Whitfield’s protagonist has to deal with the consequences of her decisions, and not all of them as blatant and obvious as what happens to the guy she was dating.

It has its flaws, of course. If the barebacks (the people who don’t change) were regarded with such distaste by the rest of the world, how on Earth did DORLA get away with acting without due process? There were a couple of major questions raised about how DORLA came to have such power to act seemingly outside what we would consider to be the law. I would have liked to see more reasoning for DORLA’s ability to lock people up indefinitely without access to a lawyer; and for their ability to use physical torture without apparent fear of retribution. Whitfield did offer up a hint of an explanation, but I found it inadequate. This is a minor complaint in an otherwise nicely told tale.

Both of these books were stories that just happened to involve werewolves, even though, superficially, werewolves were the point of the tale. For me Whitfield was the more successful: her prose was more elegant, her story more subtle. While I found myself throwing Armstrong’s book down on the floor a couple of times to have a rant to Frood, I read Whitfield’s cover to cover with nary a word of complaint.

If you want plenty of descriptions of golden fur, wolf foreplay, sex, angst and muscular bodies, Bitten is the book for you. If you want something that explores what can happen when a vital section of society finds itself no longer feeling part of that society, then I strongly recommend Bareback.